SSF: A Nearly-Perfect Sega Saturn Emulator

Presented by: Mozgus

It’s no secret that many developer interviews in the mid-90’s cited the Sega Saturn as a very complex and challenging machine to work with. In fact, it’s one of the key factors which led to machine’s downfall in the face of the Sony Playstation. Developers struggled to produce the experiences they envisioned within the time-frame allotted. If such a console were so hard for experienced, professional programmers to work with, the notion of emulating the machine must strike fear and doubt into the hearts of all who dream it.

So how did just one person accomplish that which all others could never quite reach, including Sega itself? I wish I had that answer for you, but I’ve yet to find any kind of interview with this mysterious Japanese programmer, who goes by the alias, Shima. There’s bound to be some knowledge to be had in his forum, but we’ll need someone to translate.

What I can tell you, and this is pretty much inarguable, is that SSF is by far the best means of playing a Saturn without actually owning one. Game consoles don’t last forever, and without projects like this, entire libraries of software could essentially lose it’s function someday. This is why the importance of emulation should never be underestimated. If this backlog is authentic, Shima has been dedicated to the project for over 9 years now. Very impressive.

Yes, I know there are other attempts such as Giri Giri and Satourne, and I know they deserve respect too. However, this is more of a practical introduction to Saturn emulation, and as such, I feel that SSF is the most reliable and easy to setup, and produces the most authentic experience. I would provide technical guides and such, but fortunately, others have already done this for me.

The Basics of SSF

To start with, SSF’s Wiki page provides a quick breakdown of what it is and what it does.

The official SSF page can always be found here, or try this link for a Google Translation. You can also obtain the newest builds, although not always on the same release day, at Zophar’s Domain or the like.

Requirements to Run SSF

SSF does not require a BIOS file to run, however it will raise the compatibility rate of the app, so I suggest you find one. I dare not link to one, but if you’re reading this and clicking things I share, you’ve already got a tab open to a site that offers it.

What Games Work on SSF?

For good measure, here’s a video I recorded of Panzer Dragoon Zwei running on SSF. It demonstrates how extremely close to perfect the emulation can be.

Some games like Virtua Fighter 2 require the deinterlacing checked or they look pretty tore up. I assume it’s because the game runs in 480i, whereas most games are half that, and can’t display any interlacing to begin with.

Deinterlacing can slowdown the gameplay if your CPU isn’t up to snuff.

Getting Support for SSF

Please don’t ask for support in the comments here — here’s some links that can probably get you good answers quicker

Is SSF for you?

If you once owned a Saturn and have occasionally felt nostalgic about the titles you’ve let go, stop reading this and acquire SSF immediately. It should find a permanent home on your hard drive. For those who’ve never had a Saturn, I highly suggest you acquire some of Racket’s listed gems, by any means neccessary. You’re bound to find something fun in there. Although, perhaps you’re the historical type, and want to see which games defined the Saturn. Or maybe you’re strapped for time, and require the ones that still matter today. No wait, I’ve got it. You’re a penny pincher!

Ironically, the only people it might not be for are those who still have fully working Saturns, like myself. You see, SSF has yet to implement any real advantages over a Saturn, unless you just hate dealing with discs (you can rip your game discs to ISOs and play them mounted to virtual drives), or you hate replacing the internal CMOS save battery each year. It also offers no visual enhancements, besides de-interlacing and a full screen bilinear filter (not to be confused with texture filtering). Beggars can’t be choosers however, and I certainly agree that emulation accuracy needs to be nearly flawless before visual enhancements come to play.

While by no means recent news, I hope this overview gives you guys something new to mess around with for a while.

One would assume that if the software required a DX9 capable card, it would simply not run at all. I think you debunked the claim for us though, I had a feeling it wasn’t needed. I really found it odd that people were saying SSF required DX9, as if it were using one of the exclusive features DX9 introduced. Can’t imagine what it could have been.

Very interesting. Racketboy, what do you think this will do to the market for SS games? Will they still hold their value, or will the games start dropping in price due to the “easier” emulation capabilities?

Furthermore (concerning value), since Saturn modchips are fairly cheap (albeit a little harder to come by these days) and games easily copied, I think the value of game discs has been affected as much as it ever will be. It seems to me that the value of Saturn games is driven primarily by collectors. I don’t think that people who really just want to play Panzer Dragoon Saga or Radiant Silvergun are often willing to pay the prices they go for.

Thanks for the comments. I don’t have a good computer (fastest is a P4 running maybe 1.8GHZ?) so emulation isn’t for me and I have no desire to mod my consoles. Thus I’ve bought Dragon Force and PDS, among a few others at market prices recently to both play and collect. Glad to hear that they may hold up value as it may be a while before I get to play them all the way through…

Saturns just seem to be magnetically attracted to me or something, as I have had 3 in the past 2 years or so and have sold all of them. I really want to love it, but its just not my kinda system. This will help out when I have the that craving for PDS and Astal though. Thanks!

I discovered SSF a year ago and was shocked by how mature the emulation was. I’m imagine its even better now. Most games play perfectly.

All I’d really wish for is a way to directly load ISOs (or maybe it has that now?). As it is, you need to load ISOs in Daemon Tools and then the game plays off the virtual CD.

I think SSF looks quite a bit better than my Saturn when played on a HDTV. Part of it is the bilinear filtering and scaling, the other part is that I’m able to connect over ultra-clean HDMI vs. S-Video with a regular Saturn.

Nearly perfect, except for being a closed, Windows only binary. I’ll never understand why people will invest so much time and effort actually emulating a system, and then not bother to make it available to the widest audience possible. All they need to do is open the source and someone will port it to OpenGL.

Does anyone know if any other emulators are able to play panzer dragoon zwei and radiant silvergun, but at higher resolution? I would love to see panzer dragoon bumped up, I bet it would be even more beautiful

Hatta, Windows represents 90-95% of the audience. You’ve got some real balls telling this guy to work even harder to gain that extra tiny audience (who aren’t interested in games anyway, otherwise they would have Windows). He and other emu authors do this for free. Take your crying elsewhere.

Yes, I know. He said he wants it to be open source, so it could be ported to the minor platforms. My argument still stands. There is no reason for it to be open source. That just immensely complicates things. There would be dozens of builds floating around, and maintaining compatibility would become impossible. Hatta might as well be wishing quick death for the whole project.

Well, that probably has a lot to do with how its managed.
But with your arguement, it still makes sense to open-source an emulator once its solid and mature.
We wouldn’t have a lot of the best emulators ON consoles/handhelds if it wasn’t for open source

Open Source should only happen when the author has quit. Any earlier than that, and the emulator never reaches its potential. I’ve watched this happen way too many times. No one ever adds anything good to an open source project, at least regarding emulators. They just add pointless video filters and other unnecessary stuff, while breaking functionality left and right and killing off the fanbase.

No mention of Yabause? It is catching up to SSF faster than any of the other Saturn Emulators. I find Yabause easier to use than SSF for programming (nice debugger, can boot games from binary/iso) It does lack the compatibility of SSF and the emulation is not perfect. The Dev team is constantly working on fixing and it is open source.

I forgot to mention my thoughs on SSF. SSF is a great Saturn emulator. Up until Yabause 0.7, I was using it to test my Saturn apps before burning to a cd for testing on a real Saturn. Currently it is the best.

Failed emulation projects are everywhere, closed or open source. I think the success of projects like MAME, mednafen, dosbox, ZSNES, qemu, Raine, prove that open source is not a death knell for an emulator. But I don’t mean to jack the thread.

Saturn was a very good console, especially for quality arcade ports. One unfortunate thing, however, is that eventually (I mean, in your natural lifetimes), every Saturn is going to die. It’s just the technology, so it’s great to see that Saturn emulation is getting better and better, as a video game enthusiast.

One thing, Racketboy: Radiant Silvergun is not as rare as many Westerners think. It’s actually relatively common in places like Akihabara and the like. The actual price of the game, however, defies an even simpler logic, because it can be very expensive.

That’s arguable. The fact that is still capable of playing many of the latest would seem to contradict that. Instruction sets, in addition to things such as pixel shader requirements, are not indicative of a processor’s “power”.

One point of note- PAL emulation isn’t quite right- it runs at 60hz, making the games faster. Fantastic for certain game that had PAL slowdown, makes optimised games too fast! Music generated by the Saturn (for example, NiGHTS) runs too fast due to the higher NTSC style speed. Music streamed from the CD is obviously fine.

SSF is a great emulator that I haven’t got working at full speed yet on my P4 HT and I’m not certain it will either. Have to try some of those configuration options suggested in the link, thx for the great article. I know the Saturn is a beast to emulate so I’m not pointing fingers. Wish there was a Saturn emulator that enhanced the image like ePSXe or Project64 can do. Heard Steve Snake, creator of the excellent multi-Sega system emulator Fusion was working on a Saturn emulator, hope that pans out.

II LOVE THE SATURN AND THE SSF IS ONE OF THE BEST SO FAR RUNNING EMULATORS FOR THE SS. ITS RUNNING FINE FOR ME ALL I HAVE A IS A DUO CORE 2 AT 1.8 GHZ. NOT BAD, RUNS ACTUALLY PERFECT, I USED NIGHTS FOR THE TEST AS IT USES THE SATURNS TRUE POTENTIAL, AND I FEEL LIKE IM PLAYING ALMOST ON THE SATURN. AS STATED IN THE ARTICLE ITS NOT AT 100% IM SATISFIED WITH 85% AS LONG AS I CAN PLAY THE GAME THRU THE END

As mentioned above, this is a great Saturn emulator. A Core 2 Duo or better is a must. I also want to add that running the emulator on Windows Vista requires a better CPU than on Windows XP. My parents’ laptop and my friend’s laptop both have a Core 2 Duo at 1.8 ghz. The Vista notebook runs Astal at 47~60fps, while the Windows XP one runs at constant 60fps.

Girigiri, or whatever it’s called, supposedly has a “Transparency Hack” that can blend dithered transparent effects (that the Saturn is notorious for) in to true Translucency. But I haven’t verified it.

So I ask …? I play games on the emulator Shining Force III SSF 007 beta r2, configure the game was running very slowly fluttered should I do ….???
I’m using computer intel (R) Celeron (R) 430@1.80 GHz CPU 1 GB Ram

I have a problem with SSF 010_alpha_R1 as well. Just bought a brand new HP desktop with Intel Core i5-650 running Windows 7 Home. The emulator will not launch the Saturn’s boot-up sequence and the dashboard at all, so I cannot do anything with it. I have the correct Bios and the exact same emulator works perfectly on my office laptop which has the Intel Core i5-M520. Does SSF not run on Windows 7 PC’s?

My Comps Specs are not that impressive but still runs SSF near perfect. I have tried the emu on many computers and it seems the Processor is never the bottleneck. It is usually always the Amount of RAM in you system and the (FPS) Speed ability of your video card. Since my computer has onboard graphics anything less than 2GB of Ram will make the emulator run Slow on 3d games.(remember the saturn had 8X32bit processors) I have also tested on a machine that was a single core AMD 1.8GHZ onboard graphics(geforce 6100) with 4GB of ram [ddr 800], and it plays the 3D at 100% speed. Even better than my comp at 2.1GHZ.
———SPECS—————————————–
CPU: AMD 1.7GHZ Sempron(single core) O/C’d to 2.1GHZ
Mem: 2GB DDR 800
Grafx: Onboard Geforce 6100 Nforce 430
HD: 120gb 7200rpm

this Comp runs the emulator at
100% for 2d games
90% for 3d games
(newer versions (0.10+) take more processing power I use 0.8 -for House of the dead, 0.9 -Nights, Panzer Dragoon and .11 -Shining Force 3 You get the hang of it after a while)

I owned a Saturn for many years. Spent a bunch of time playing Shining force 3 scenario 1 and then was pissed for years that they never planned to bring the other 2 discs of the same game over to english. Years later it turns out I wasn’t the only one pissed, Rom Hacking Fans have taken the Japanese ISOs and Translated the other 2 discs and the premium disc. It feels like someone just handed me a daydream from the past. Many other Jrpgs (nearly as many original rpgs as the PlayStation) were never brought over as well, some of these are now being fan translated. To us who only speak English though it’s as if a brand new game for an old console has been released for free.

“Open Source should only happen when the author has quit. Any earlier than that, and the emulator never reaches its potential. I’ve watched this happen way too many times. No one ever adds anything good to an open source project, at least regarding emulators. They just add pointless video filters and other unnecessary stuff, while breaking functionality left and right and killing off the fanbase.”

Pointless MY ASS. The graphics (including the polygons) look extremely pixelated in SSF and it makes the graphics UGLY as fuck, which is a shame as some Saturn games have gorgeous graphics. Whether it’s the emulator or the Saturn’s fault I don’t know, but fact is, they look much sharper when played on the actual hardware and with a TV screen. Before filters came out, SSF was in SERIOUS NEED of them, and filters that smooth the image not only make the graphics prettier, but they make them look CLOSER to what they would look like if played on a real Saturn (as they look smoother on a TV screen than on a computer monitor).

Best Saturn emulator. Too bad it runs games at a unfiltered scale of 2x that can’t be disabled, making the game look REALLY pixelated and ugly. I would rather play the games in a small window using the games’ real scale, as SSF’s pixelated-looking polygons make me want to poke my eyes out and it totally ruins the graphics of beautiful games like NiGHTS.

I’ve used this emulator to play expensive games like Panzer Dragoon Saga. It ran very slowly on my old laptop, but on my gaming PC it runs perfectly. You can use usb controllers, also, so I play w/ my 360 controller (wireless w/ adapter). It’s not ideal for fighting games, but for other games it’s great.

I usually try to play all games on the real hardware with the real game, but some games are just too expensive.

So Mozgus complains about people adding extra features such as filters to emulators for free, yet I’m the one who gets called an “ungrateful person complaining about a free program he uses to play his free games” when I defend them? What?

Well well… I should comment by saying congrats RacketBoy. I’ve been playing SSF for many years now with no complaints. In fact, I’m still on my same PC. Yeah, I don’t need a powerful PC when this one has all the power I need. Been playin N64, SS, Sega G, SNES, NES, GB, NDS, PS1, PS2, and last but not least DC. I’ve not had a problem with any of these and I’ve had my PC since 05. Single core processor at that. The accuracy of SSF however I have noticed plays slightly better on a 64bit system albeit it is faster. Other than that, I love these games still to this date and the only addition I can say is the Shining Force 3 translation for sc. 2 & 3. I never got to play these when I was younger. Could have, but did not want to take the time to learn Japanese. Now, I am playing scenario 2 bout halfway through with no bugs still. For all those complainers… either buy the system or figure out how to emulate it. It isn’t that complicated if you know how to google and read or ask a good question, mind you every stupid question deserves a stupid answer. The PS3 remote for my games also is awesome and RacketBoy… Keep up the work dog. Looking forward to xbox emulator one day that plays more than Halo.

Oh by the way… the idiots who say it looks pixelated… learn how to use the settings and your PC. Mine has never looked better. WAAAAAAAYY better than the real system, so if you don’t know why or your mad because of this… why don’t you ask questions on how to fix the problem and maybe, just maybe, you might be pleased by the outcome or just stay the retards you are. SSF Ver0.11 alpha is my version. Under screen check Bilinear fitering, auto field skip, strech screen, full size, and v-synch in full window. Under sound check linear filtering and change to 2048. Program one only check both VDP2’s and set thread numbers to 11 and DSP Dynamic Recompiler. If you can’t set to 0 and it will automatically set to 11. Program 2 set from top to bottom: 24, 4.00, 110, 100, 50, 200. Program 3 check check sprite priority, check cycle pattern, and memory access wait. Fianally, Program 4 check hook back up and deinterlace and enjoy you game. Do not use easy settings. Have fun. Been using that setup since the first emulator was out. RacketBoy… 2 thunbs up bro

Clearly you’re brain damaged, as I just used the settings you recommended graphics still look pixelated as ****. So unless you can upload a screenshot to ImageShack or some similar service and show us that your emulator really renders graphics as smoothly as you claim, I’m going to call BS and tell you to take that stick out of your arse.

@ sh
I don’t know if you ever played Saturn games using a SCART cable on a hi ress flatscreen tv but they are also pixelated thats just the saturns low res graphics. This console and EMU where never intended for HD graphics or modern day lcd screen

To be honest SSF needs as fast a processor as you can give it, remember the Saturn had 2 processors these where especially effective in fighters against the cpu.
The Saturn will never look good on an LCD monitor or tv, it just wasnt made for it, to get good emulation you need a CRT monitor, then it will be like using a Saturn.
I give full cedit to the writer of SSF, i have been a fan of the Saturn since its launch day and was diapointed with its short life but i continue to love its games and the way it is.
To really apreciate the SSF emulator you need a Saturn bios, as you get the proper start up music and graphic, that really makes me feel im using a Saturn.
I would say 99% of games work but be aware some need a little bit of fiddling with in the settings to get them running but its worth it.
I love the SSF emulator and it amazes me its as good as it is, the creator is nothing short of a genius, long live Saturn games

I like how people are not reading the post dates and are replying to month old posts to yell at people even though they probably will never read this article again. The only brain damaged here are the ones who bash months old or even year old posts. Unless you understand how the Saturns dual CPU’s work and want to create a emulator with graphics enhancements while keeping SSF’s compatibility you are just yelling at a brick wall basically because SSF uses software rendering to ensure accuracy. SSF has not been updated for 2 years and the site for it is down so the chances of more graphics enhancements are very slim. The Saturn is not a system you can just make an emulator for easily because of its dual CPU’s and so graphics enhancements are the last thing Saturn emulator coders are thinking about. Stop complaining or make your own emulator.

I agree with Nope.avi. What people don’t realize is that SSF is basically the MAME of Saturn games. It is not meant for high def graphics because it uses software rendering and so it cannot use anti aliasing, anisotropic filtering, and other graphics enhancements. If you are going to complain to the developers about graphics quality you might as well complain to the MAME developers about Tekken 1 through Tag Tournament and Virtua Fighter having bad graphics because they don’t care about high resolution rendering because that makes the emulator require the GPU and that causes inaccurate rendering of games. SSF is meant to be accurate and play a ton of Saturn games with great compatibility , it is not meant to render a few games in high definition and play the rest terribly. Emulators that use dynamic recompilation such as Dolphin, PCSX2, NullDC, and other emulators utilize the GPU and are far less accurate than SSF and MAME. When you add the ability to enhance a game’s visuals using the GPU you lose accuracy and then sometimes the game can have unexpected behavior that would not be present on the native system.

Making the emulator open source would not help because there is a scarce amount of people interested in Saturn emulation. All that it would do is allow a few novice coders to make some lousy revisions of SSF that cause some games to stop working unless someone skilled with Saturn emulation comes along which is highly unlikely. Open source only works if their is a huge interest in the system being emulated which is why it worked for MAME, ZSNES, medanfen, DOSbox, qemu, and Raine because those emulators were for popular systems. There is no Mcgyver of Saturn emulation that can make a emulator that is as accurate as SSF while allowing for graphics enhancements comparable to EPSXE, ZSNES, Dolphin, NullDC, PCSX2, Final Burn Alpha and other emulators with good graphic enhancing capabilities. The reason why the games are very pixilated is because they were meant for interlaced displays such as a CRT TV, they were not meant for LCD monitors and TVs because those use progressive scan. What graphic enhancements do in emulators is they attempt to filter out the pixelation caused by deinterlacing the game. This causes the emulation to be inaccurate which is not what the SSF developers are hoping for. Maybe in the future when CPUs are MUCH more powerful than they are now it could be possible for high resolution rendering with accuracy intact. If you want the games to not be pixelated, you will need to hook up your computer to a CRT TV.

For the people who wish to use Yabuse you may not want to because it has far less compatibilily than SSF. Yabuse seems to have scratchy audio on most of its games and the control settings will not let me use my directional pad on my controller. The next update might make Yabuse have better audio but it still has a long way to go to be as good as SSF.

Actually PCSX2 does not work that well, it as you may have seen takes a very powerful processor and graphics card to run it (at least the developers recomend it) this is because it is all done in software, they have not figured out how to emulate the emotion engine properly yet, if they had it would run on hardware like the PS1 emulator does.
SSF as far as im concerned acurately emulates the saturn cpu, most games run perfect, use a crt and you are hard pressed to tell its not a saturn you are using.
Yabuse is not in the same league as SSF it works for some games, but as said it has issues with audio and controllers, for the moment SSF is the only emulator for Saturn.
We need this emulator as the Saturn itself will not be around forever, the oldest saturn is now 19 years old.
Soon only the cds will survive and to have nothing to play some of Segas greatest games would be a shame.
I know the games have been ported to modern consoles, but is it the same ?

Nobody said anything about running the games in higher resolutions than on the real hardware or enhancing the graphics. In fact, NOT being able to run the games at native resolution is the problem. The point is that SSF always renders games at an unfiltered scale of 2x, making the graphics look too pixelated, without offering the option to run them at 1x.

@Nope.avi
I love how you’re bashing people for replying to months old posts by responding to months old posts. I guess you’re brain damaged by your own account, then?